Twilio CEO Lawson: A Lesson From Amazon’s Bezos

Jeff Lawson, the founder and chief executive of cloud computing company Twilio (TWLO), was also one of the first product executives at Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Amazon Web Services, and on Wednesday afternoon he took to the stage at the Mobile World Congress to share a little bit of what he learned from Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

Lawson, with an intense stare behind black glasses, paced the giant stage at the show, making sure to play to both sides of the house, and punctuating his points with the raised index finger, generally demonstrating real passion for his argument.

Lawson’s entire pitch to the audience of telecom executives and industry folk was about how software is taking over everything — not just code itself, but the mindset of software. He traced that back to the words of Bezos.

“I remember one of these all-hands meetings, somebody asked a question, and I don’t even remember what the question was,” said Lawson. “But I remember what Jeff’s response was. Jeff said, ‘We are a software company, just as much as that other company down in Redmond,’” a reference to Microsoft (MSFT).

“'They ship software on compact disks, but we are in a brown box that shows up at your door.'"

“Our ability to win’,” Lawson continued the anecdote, “‘is to arrange magnetic particles on a hard drive better than the competition.’"

Lawson repeated that for emphasis.

“What a great definition of what it is to be a software person: people who solve business problems with magnetic particles; not just developers, but people throughout a company who are able to see business problems who are trying to solve them through this lens. Software people fundamentally believe any problem can be solved once you pull that problem into the realm of software."

And, “It’s a great time to be a software developer,” said Lawson. That’s because the smartphone is “digitizing” more and more of the world, bringing into into the domain of software.

What does it mean to be in such a mindset? Lawson said “as software people, we are always shipping.” He said his previous startups, and there are several, gave him an inspiration by showing just how far the world of communications is from the world of software.

“They would always tell you things like, why would you reinvent the wheel, you should just buy what we have,” he said, referring to communications equipment vendors. The problem, said Lawson, was that buying things in the world of telecom, meant issuing a request for proposal, or RFP, which would go out to vendors. But, “You’ve already lost” with that approach, he said, "because you don’t actually know everything you need to know at the start of a project."

And so, “if you want to do version two at some point, you have to go back to the vendor and do another RFP…"

In contrast, software is a mindset of not having fixed goals, but innovating constantly, he suggested. The software “ethos,” he suggested, was that “as software people, we are always shipping,” and always building code, obviously."

Today, “The software mindset is starting to invade every single market and every industry,” said Lawson. As companies compete for customers, more and more what they are doing is trying to perfect the customer experience, and that’s all about software these days, given how much of interaction takes place via apps and such. “The software ethos is becoming critical to nearly every industry,” he said.

After his opening pitch, Lawson hosted customers who use Twilio to build their own businesses, and who are to him also exemplars of the software mindset.

One such fellow was Taavet Hinrikus, founder and CEO of Transferwise, a startup doing money transfer. It was interesting to see Lawson sit down in the armchairs to have a discussion with Hinrikus about the business, and spoke to the level of engagement of Lawson with those using his service, which, like his passion for software, should be an encouraging sign to investors.

Twilio shares on Wednesday closed the session up 60 cents, or 1.9%, at $32.32.

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